WE’LL FIGHT FOR OUR CHILDREN

Fed up with the murders of children, We Are The Change (WAC), a group of concerned people from the Laventille community, yesterday launched the Akil Phillips Foundation in order to track and encourage youths to be productive and stay out of trouble.

Akil Phillips, 16, was a student of St Anthony’s College. He was attacked, robbed of his Samsung J5 cellphone, and murdered outside his grandmother’s Laventille home on the night of April 5.

The group held an anti-crime rally yesterday in which participants walked from the junction of Picton and Laventille roads to Piccadilly Greens, Independence Square to the Queen’s Park Savannah where they were entertained by people from their community.

Speaking to Sunday Newsday after the rally the group’s founder, Candace Phillip, a teacher at St Barbs Government Primary School said, “For the past ten years or so, every year I attend a funeral or two of one of my past pupils. The most recent one was Akil Phillips. This student, like others, was not engaged in any criminal activity, any gang, or any violence and he was murdered.

“We are here today to tell the criminal elements in Laventille that we are fed up, we are tired and wary of the loss of lives, especially young children. It must be stopped. And we will do everything in our power to make that change.”

She explained that the Akil Phillips Foundation will track young people as they leave school, whether they drop out or finish secondary school. Members will continually contact young people to find out what they are doing. If the youths are not engaged in some kind of study or employment, the members would try to get them into a programme.

“Every three months we are going to contact you, we are going to provide you with courses for you to be qualified, to be more marketable. We are going to track you until the age of about 25 and by that time you should not be interested, or you should not have such low self-esteem or be encouraged to join any gang or go into anything negative.”

Phillip said the foundation would like to start with the Russell Latapy Secondary School, or another school in the Morvant/Laventille area, and hopefully expand with the assistance of other NGOs, government, or corporate sponsors. They also needed more support as, at the moment, its members were mostly parents of Mentor Alley, Laventille.

Also in attendance was Laventille West MP Fitzgerald Hinds. He said the group recognised each individual had to be the change and they were committed to do something about it. He said he was present to give WAC his support and blessing, as well as his assurance that he would do all he could to ensure “some kind of peace, sobriety and sanity” was restored to Laventille.

“Recently we lost 16-year-old Akil Phillips and that death caused real trauma and tremors throughout the entire community. But he wasn’t the first and certainly wasn’t the last, so the group decided they would come together and take a walk through Laventille to say to the community, ‘We’ve had enough of this unnecessary loss and trauma and pain...’ They are a beautiful people, a beautiful community, but traumatised by ignorants with guns and we would like to say something and more importantly do something about it.”

He said he intended to assist in any way possible, including keeping in constant contact with law enforcement, and using any information and intelligence to root out the criminal elements causing stress in the community.

The parents of Phillips, Joezal Vaughans and Alexander Phillips, were also present. Vaughans said she felt good about the foundation started in her son’s name believing it was a start to making a difference in the community.

Alexander agreed saying even if people did not walk with them, they came out of their homes, stood in their galleries, or looked out their windows to voice their support for the parents and the initiative.

However, he said the community had to keep up that support, show of defiance, and remain united. He acknowledged some people did not have the courage to call the police for fear of repercussion but said if the community was united the criminals would not know who might report them.

“It can’t just stop. When people start to get comfortable something like this rally must happen again to wake them up. When the outrage goes dormant these fellas (criminals) get the strength to do what they want.”

Vaughans added that she hoped it would make criminal think before they act, make them realise the next innocent child murdered could be their child or family member if things continued as it has. “These children have the ability to make a difference out here. My child wanted to make a difference but he didn’t get to. Hopefully, with this, in death he could still make a difference.”

Another WAC supporter was Gina Betancourt Thomas.

Thomas explained that on July 29, 2018, her niece, Tyesha De Souza, 21, from Trou Macaque was stabbed and killed near Port of Spain General Hospital. Since then she lost two cousins to gun violence and this year her husband, Daniel Thomas, was murdered on Mother’s Day, leaving behind their four children. Previous to her niece, two other cousins were shot and killed.

“I really appreciate this initiative. We have to stand for something or else fall for anything. The crime, the gun violence, the territory thing, all of it is nonsense. Many of the youths would have interacted with each other in school and then split off and fight as they get into gangs. They are just inheriting this cycle of gang violence and they don’t even know why they’re fighting.”

She hoped the people of Laventille would support the initiative, help restore the area, and save the lives of their children.